Ruminations on law and life

What’s up with Twitter?

Is it just me? A business owner asked me yesterday if I was using Twitter to promote my law business. I said “No.” But I added that I’d yet to figure out the business side of Twitter. “What’s the point?” I asked.

Far as I know, the company behind Twitter has yet to figure out a business side, as well. From what I’ve read, Twitter isn’t making any money from Twitter and this, despite all the many thousands if not hundreds of thousands of users. What’s up with that?

Now, not long ago, I visited the website of a newly-shingled local lawyer I’d just met. I saw that he was posting his “tweets” on his site. Like lame Japanese Haiku, the tweets were nonsensically self-indulgent. One tweet found the lawyer sitting outside the courtroom door waiting for his client. Another tweet mentioned how excited he was about seeing his kids later that day. (I imagined the tweet implied some type of custodial arrangement, but who knows? Who cares?)

I’m sorry (no, not really). But aside from the narcissism and the obvious self-indulgence, there’s a false assumption made by the users of this technology. And that assumption is that others share our same interest in our mundane musings on the unremarkable daily acts that make up ordinary life.

Let’s see, I’ll tweet about the ham sandwich I’m having for lunch or how I’m standing in line at the ATM machine or how I am teeing off on No. 12 with my new Taylormade Burner. Really?

Sadly, all of this twittering stuff is nothing more than an extension of reality television’s hold on our lives. Whether its the TV reality of idle rich wives or the romancing of plus-size women, our media-created cultural fascination with celebrity continues its choke-hold. It scarcely matters whether its celebrity of the well-established kind or celebrity with the lifespan of 2 sequentially cooked soft-boiled eggs.

Of course some of the more prosaic among us admittedly have such self-love that they see themselves as celebrities in their our minds. But here’s news. No one else really cares about your absurdly commonplace and ordinary workday lives.

I’m not sure that we ought to care about the inane unexceptional acts of celebrities either. The other day, I read in the paper how Sen. John McCain was grateful that his tweets had so many followers. I haven’t paid attention. But maybe the good senator does have something to say in 140 characters? But on the other hand, it continues to escape me, “Why does anyone care that Austin Kutcher tweets about his second latte at Starbucks?”